Tag Archives for multiplication

“A key to respecting indigenous art forms is to connect the Good News via the most appropriate communication modality for the people we are reaching…

Biblically speaking, it thus seems best to see a worship gathering as a time of indigenous artistic expressions that draw people from an indigenous background into connection with God. This would suggest the more worship services we can offer, the more opportunities we can offer for people to connect with God.

by Bob Whitesel D.Min., Ph.D., 2/8/18.

I found that all church organizations, regardless of size, grow the quickest by multiplying their sub-congregations. So in other words, they see themselves not as one homogeneous unit but rather as a heterogeneous organization with many indigenous cultural channels to communicate the Good News and through which to celebrate it.

For example, a multiple sub-congregational model blooms when even a small church adds a youth program. The youth program has its own leader, it’s own style, its own music and its own outreach. It is a sub-congregation, of a different culture. Then, as the church grows over 100 attendees it can often begin to reach out to a different culture by offering a different service with a slightly modified culturally aesthetic.

Of course working against this is the concept that people want to be united. And when they say that, they usually mean they want to be united in the worship gathering. However the Hebrew word for worship means to come close to God as if to kiss His feet. It doesn’t mean fellowship.

So biblically speaking, it seems best to see a worship gathering as a time of indigenous artistic expressions that draw people from an indigenous background into connection with God. This would suggest the more worship services we can offer, the more opportunities we can offer for people to connect with God.

If we want to call them “fellowship services” instead of worship services, then we could see unity as an objective. But it’s hard to create unity in a sanctuary.

One young lady I interviewed for a book said it was hard to create fellowship in the sanctuary because, “The seats all face the wrong direction.”

So therefore, I see “sub-congregation multiplication” as a key to respecting indigenous art forms and to connecting the Good News via the most appropriate communication modality for the people we are reaching.

…Mraz went to Taco Church, where a small group of men gathered for breakfast, Bible study, jokes and prayer. The group, started by an Episcopal priest and a few guys from his gym, shared vulnerability in a way that Mraz had rarely seen. Sometimes he had to step outside the fast-food restaurant to cry.

The priest, the Rev. Sean Steele, told Mraz that Taco Church was part of the newly launched St. Isidore Episcopal, a “church without walls” focused on small group discipleship and community service. The church didn’t have a building, and it didn’t want one, Steele said. Instead, it had a cellphone app, linking members to the church’s many parts.

As Steele explained, St. Isidore was one church embodied in many different ways. It wasn’t just Taco Church. It would eventually become three house churches, a pub theology group, a free laundry ministry, a food truck and more. It was all quite unorthodox, except the liturgy and theology, which were decidedly Episcopalian.

… This Easter, a little over a year after his first Taco Church, Mraz and his 6-year-old son were baptized in a service he helped organize as a member of the St. Isidore leadership team.

Finding new possibilities

As many mainline Protestant churches shrink and shutter across the United States, St. Isidore is finding new possibilities by marrying a denomination’s traditions with a decentralized structure drawn from the emergent-church playbook. It’s a mission church and “research and development” effort launched by Trinity Episcopal Church, a 1,500-member parish in The Woodlands, a suburb north of Houston.

“I am not trying to do something old in a new way; I am trying to do something brand-new in the old way,” said Steele, the entrepreneurial 38-year-old priest behind the experiment. “Many [church planters] feel they need to jettison the tradition. I actually think we need to be more church, not less.”

Steele holds tightly to Episcopal liturgy even as he brings it into novel settings such as breweries and laundromats. St. Isidore is aimed not just at unorthodox places, he said, but also at unorthodox people, like the formerly Daoist chicken farmer who now runs the pub theology group.

“I’m trying to think about the people who aren’t going to a church on a Sunday morning,” Steele said. “I’m not interested in getting Christians that are already Christian.”

What are the thresholds to your church? How can they be made easier to cross?

The Rev. Gerry Sevick, the rector at Trinity (link is external), hired Steele straight out of seminary in 2012 with the understanding that he would eventually plant a new church or start a missional community.

“There’s a population out there hungry for spirituality and hungry for a community of faith,” Sevick said. “While they’re skeptical about a traditional church, they are willing to explore an alternative way of being church.”

Commentary by Professor B: As I research/write a new course on “church multiplication and growth,” I am encouraging students to think of creative new ways to fund church planting. Having planted a church myself, as well as having written/coached many church plants, I believe the usual funding model is inadequate and forces church plants to be less contextualized. In the past 25+ years, I have seen that reliance upon external funding and external contexts often rob a church plant of its contextual intelligence.

Here’s an article published by Missio Alliance about this problem. I will be using this article in my new course to encourage students to design innovative ways to address it.

“The Big Problem with Barna’s Study on Church Startups and Money”

… 5 Ways Too Much Money Can Rot Your Church Plant

Planters and denominational folk, please pay attention.

1) Excessive external funding can kill a church’s feel for context.

… Church plant structures and expectations need to be tied to context. Intimately. The best kind of church planting is committing long term to a specific location among a specific people group. We’re at our best when we tie our fate to people and place. It worked for Jesus and it will work for His church. Your life, your practices, and even your finances all need to be shaped by context. This is fundamental to incarnating the gospel.

Too much external funding interferes with this process. Tuning your communal lives to your context takes feel. It takes tension. To do it right your church will need to live somewhere between what the people want and what the people can afford.

2) Excessive external funding robs us of creativity.

You’ve heard that necessity is the mother of invention? Excessive external funding robs us of necessity. Without the tension created by necessity you won’t be as likely to actively seek out novel contextual solutions. Forcing your church, as much as possible – to be here in this place with these people – creates irreplaceable fuel for your church’s imagination.

This lack of invention doesn’t just affect the local church either. It spreads to the broader church too. One of the great gifts that planting gives the broader church is inventiveness. Less local innovation means less denominational innovation. Calling us to double down on the same old models should be a sure sign that we have a growing imagination deficit. More money won’t fix that.

The will to survive properly resides within the plant itself. Denominational coffers should never house your church’s survival instincts. Instead, the will to survive should come from a deep collective sense of God’s calling, love for each other, and your deep burden for the needs of your context. Your survival instincts have to be built together piece by piece over time. Too much outside financial support messes with this process. It can also make people outside your church the owners of your church. Not good.

4) Excessive external funding can mess with your sense of calling.

Planters would also do well to check their own motivations for church planting. The kind of planting work we have ahead of us will not be for the faint of heart. Reaching the hard to reach peoples in North American culture is going to take time. The harder to reach the more fruitless years you may have ahead of you. Are you ready to put in 15+ years with next to nothing to show for it? That’s not an uncommon missionary reality. Google it. It may soon be our reality too.

And for even more about this problem (and some solutions with examples), check out the Abingdon Press book, Growth by accident, Death by planning: How not to kill a growing congregation. Three of the above five missteps with external funding mentioned by Siebert are addressed with solutions in my book.

The challenge, however, is that scaling requires both an unrelenting ambition to grow, and simultaneously, an extreme amount of patience. Scaling is not as easy as throwing money at a problem, or hiring as many people as possible. If anything, those kinds of decisions end up running you into the ground.

Instead, I like to think of scaling as the result of your foundation. The stronger the foundation, the easier it is to scale…

1. It’s all about the customer.

One of my favorite quotes is by Sam Walton, founder of Walmart and Sam’s Club. He said, “There is only one boss, the customer, and he can fire everybody from the chairman on down by simply bringing his business somewhere else.”

That’s the absolute truth.

This is something I talk about extensively in my book for emerging entrepreneurs, All In. If you don’t have your eye on the client experience every minute of every day, you’re completely missing the point of why you are in business.

2. Fix mistakes fast.

If you can’t fix the small errors now, how do you expect to fix the big errors later on?

Repeat after me: it’s never the customer’s fault. When trouble hits, don’t be defensive about it. Don’t run around trying to assign blame. Just fall on your sword and do whatever it takes to fix it fast.

…I don’t count the screw-ups that happen in my companies as much as I keep tabs on how quickly problems are resolved. I always tell my people, “We’re all human, and we’re going to make mistakes. But the customer is going to remember how fast you fix the problem more than they’re going to remember the mistake itself.”

3. Underpromise, overdeliver.

You may demand perfection from yourself, your partners, and your employees, but you can’t let that carry over to how you talk to your customers.

Don’t promise perfection to them. Just don’t. ..

4. Tailor your experience to the customer–don’t expect them to adjust to you.

This is a hugely important lesson in today’s market.

You can’t make customers adjust to you. You have to tailor your experience to them, and make them feel like they’re part of your family…

Commentary by Prof. B.: I am sitting next to Asbury Seminary’s Charles Hunter III at the annual meeting of The Great Commission Research Network (Asbury Theological Seminary, Oct. 19, 2017). Dr. Hunter is author of the popular book The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West Againand professor of church growth and multiplication at Asbury. We were discussing how buildings become money-pits for most churches because churches overbuild.

In response Dr. Hunter replied:

People don’t realize that a secret to Saint Patrick’s success evangelizing the Celts was his use of multiple service times in small chapels. They didn’t build big buildings that could hold everyone. This is because timber in Ireland was usually very short in length.

This resulted in small “chapels” which have three strategic advantages:

They had multiple small gatherings, and many of them every Sunday. They met almost all day long on Sunday, so everyone could have a worship experience.

This kept the focus from being on maintaining a large facility.

This also resulted in a lay-lead movement. You needed a lot of laity involved to have so many services.

Commentary by Prof. B.: Small chapels had the unexpected results of creating more lay opportunities to become involved, more times for attendees to fit church into their schedule as well as kept the focus from becoming the maintenance of a large facility.

…with the number of tools available today, the goal of becoming a profitable entrepreneur is more achievable than it was ten years ago. Today, it’s easier to connect with people, find mentors who have years of experience related to where you want to go, and read books to accelerate your growth.

I recently caught up with Tai Lopez to pick his brain… An investor, partner, and advisor to over 20 multi-million dollar businesses sums up his occupation…

He attributes his success majorly to mentors he’s had and books he’s read. Here are some excerpts from my chat with him:

Kasteler: Could you share your story of starting out as an entrepreneur?

Lopez: I really started at around age 19 when I partnered with my first mentor Joel Salatin. I was working for him on his farm, and a neighbor farm came up available for rent but Joel said he was too busy to do it.

So I said, “What if I take over the farm, you put the money in to start it, and I will split the profits with you?” He said, “Well, as long as you do all the work.”

I worked on that farm every night when I was done at Joel’s farm, I’d drive an hour and work late into the night on that other farm. My profit after one year was $12,000 after I split and paid back Joel. It felt as a lot of money at the time because I’d never seen that much money–it was a great start. One of the things I learned is that when you’re first starting out, it’s great if you can partner up with somebody who is more stable…

What lead you to reading a book a day?

I already started with that concept back when I was 19. Joel Salatin had a mentor named Allan Nation who was visiting from Mississippi and one day he came down to eat breakfast with us and he started talking with all these interesting stories and anecdotes and facts right off the tip of his tongue.

I was like, “How do you know so much about this subject? I do not even remember it.” Allan said, “Oh, I read a book this morning before breakfast.” This was on a farm, so we were eating breakfast at 7:30 in the morning. And I said, “What do you mean, you read a book this morning?”

He said, “Yeah, every morning before I eat, I read a book.” I asked him how long it takes him and he was like, about an hour. He just sat there and would read a book, had developed a great memory, and that was always a set impression on me. I didn’t always read a book a day, but I went in phases–I’d always have that as my goal and landmark of what was possible.

…put a book and a chair in a little room even if you want to read for five minutes a day…

It doesn’t really matter how long you do it. People make the mistake of reading a lot and burn out. They’re like, “I cannot do that, I do not have the time.”